The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  In 1871, the Communards, as one of their last acts, had destroyed many of the police records and pictures. The Paris police subsequently had to rebuild their photographic records from scratch. By the end of the decade, the prefecture had about sixty thousand images in its possession. The quality of these varied with the skill of the photographer, and there was no way of classifying records by the image on them, so only by chance — and then without certainty — would two cards made at different times be matched with each other.

  Thus Bertillon soon realized that, in addition to the strain of ten daily hours of rote copying, every minute of his time was wasted on an activity that was of no use whatsoever. The schoolboy who refused to spend time on subjects that he didn’t like now reasserted himself. Except for his father’s disapproving gaze (and the fact that it was at last necessary for the son to do something to earn a living), Bertillon might simply have quit. Instead, he drew on his knowledge of statistics, the field in which his grandfather, father, and brother excelled.

  About 1840, a Belgian named Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, who is often called the father of modern statistics, stated that no two human beings in the world have exactly the same physical dimensions. Other statisticians accepted this as a given, and Bertillon began to develop a series of measurements of the human body that could be used for identification purposes. He got permission from the head of the local jail to measure the prisoners, and by August 1879, he believed that creating such a system was possible. He sent a report to the prefect of police, Louis Andrieux, who did not reply. When Bertillon was advanced to assistant clerk in October of that year, he sent a second letter to the prefect. He explained that the system he proposed was based on the Quetelet study of French crime statistics in A Treatise on Man, which included measurements of the human physique.

  Andrieux had little patience for this young upstart who was trying to bring about an upheaval in the department’s methods — even though he knew from personal experience that much of the information in the records was incorrect: when appointed prefect, Andrieux had taken a look at his own dossier and found it riddled with false information and groundless accusations, the kind of material the police typically gleaned from informants and spies.

  Nevertheless, Andrieux sent Bertillon’s proposal to the chief of the Sûreté, Gustave Macé, who likewise was unimpressed. Macé had considerable experience with police work and had by now attained fame by solving the Voirbo case. But he was a man who had worked his way up from street cop to the head of the Sûreté and along the way had become convinced that gut feelings and practical skills were superior to scientific methods. The detective’s “nose” and his memory (à la Vidocq) were the most important tools to him. It did not help that Bertillon, by even the most sympathetic accounts, was an unprepossessing person. Regarded by some as a pompous pedant, he tended to lecture others, even his superiors, in a manner that aroused resentment. This was certainly true in the case of Andrieux, who, after getting a negative reaction from Macé, not only rejected Bertillon’s proposal but wrote a letter to the young man’s father, suggesting that Alphonse might be mentally disturbed and that if he continued to make bizarre suggestions, his job would be at risk.

  No doubt Andrieux was well aware that Dr. Bertillon had pulled strings to obtain the police clerk position for his ne’er-do-well son, and there may have been a certain amount of resentment behind the letter. Sadly, Louis-Adolphe showed Andrieux’s missive to his son, who responded with his only defense — the “evidence” of his derangement, the report he had prepared for Andrieux.

  To Dr. Bertillon’s credit, he read the document with an open mind and found it impressive; he even admitted that his son might well be onto something. But Louis-Adolphe also knew that politics played a greater role in changing the way governmental agencies worked than did brilliant ideas. It would be better, he told his son, to wait. The tenures of police prefects tended to be short; Andrieux would one day retire or move to another government post. Alphonse should prepare for that day by developing his identification system more thoroughly — perfecting it.

  So Bertillon did so, selecting body parts to measure that he felt were least likely to change as a person aged. In the final version of what he called anthropometry, but became better known as bertillonage, eleven measurements are used. These fall into three categories:

  1. Body: height, width of outstretched arms, and sitting height.

  2. Head: length of head, breadth of head, bizygomatical diameter, and length of the right ear.

  3. Limbs: length of left foot, length of left middle finger and left little finger, and length of the left arm from the elbow to the tip of the outstretched middle finger. Bertillon favored making measurements on the left side because that side was least likely to be affected by work.

  Bertillon calculated that the chances against all eleven points being found in any two individuals was 268,435,456 to 1. For him, that was not quite certain enough, and so he added three more points — descriptive, instead of those, like the first eleven, that could be obtained by scientific instruments. These were the color of the eyes, the hair, and the pigmentation of the skin.

  Around this time, Bertillon met an attractive woman who asked for his help crossing the street. There comes a moment in most men’s lives when they manage, if only momentarily, to shed their natural awkwardness and social ineptitude. This was Bertillon’s. He commented on the woman’s accent and learned that she had been born in Austria. She said she had only recently arrived in Paris and was earning a living by giving German lessons. Bertillon replied that he had long wanted to learn German. And so…

  The young woman’s name was Amélie Notar. During the course of his German lessons, Alphonse noticed that her handwriting was unusually small and neat. Bertillon’s own reflected his physical awkwardness, making his task of filling out cards at the department even more onerous. When Amélie learned of Bertillon’s hope to one day introduce his system to the police files, she offered her assistance. Her clearly written cards made possible the next step of bertillonage — finding a way to classify the descriptive cards so that they could be easily referenced. Bertillon’s niece, who wrote a biography of him, commented on their collaboration: “For him the thought; for her the action.” 9

  Now he was able to solve the problem of classification. Random filing of the cards would, of course, produce no benefits once the number of cards grew, so Bertillon had to come up with a cascading system of options. He began with the length of the head. The resulting measurements (like those of all eleven physical dimensions in Bertillon’s method) were divided into three groups: small, medium, and large. The process was then repeated with the breadth of the head, producing nine groups (three squared) — and so on through seven of the eleven measurements. The cards were further divided by seven gradations of eye color, defined by Bertillon. These may seem like a lot, but in practice it was actually a fairly rapid process, once a subject’s measurements were taken, to find the file in which his card would be found, presuming that he had been measured once before. “A criminal could be measured, looked up and identified in a matter of minutes,” according to one modern authority. 10

  Increasingly impatient, Bertillon occupied his spare time taking prisoners’ measurements and recording them, preparing for the day when he would be allowed to show what he could do for the police. He began to enhance the value of the cards he was still making (using the tried-and-true descriptive method) by affixing to them photographs of the prisoners. This had been done on an irregular basis before, but Bertillon saw the need to standardize the poses; he originated the front- and side-view mug shots, which were eventually adopted by police photographers everywhere. Dissatisfied with the shoddy work of others, he learned to take photographs himself, carefully lighting the subjects so that a clear and precise image could be made.

  Finally, a new prefect of police took Andrieux’s place, and Bertillon’s father once more used his connections to introduce his son’s plan. The
prefect, a man named Jean Camecasse, listened to Alphonse’s explanation. Unfortunately, Bertillon could not refrain from explaining the relationship between demography and etymological classifications and its importance in identifying recidivists. In his customary fashion, the discourse grew long and complex.

  Camecasse shrugged. The young man’s father had connections, so it would be best to humor him. “We must be practical here,” Camecasse reminded Alphonse. “We are not scientists, who can afford the luxury of experimenting without result.” 11 Bertillon must have bitten his tongue. Still, Camecasse gave Bertillon three months to prove that his system could in fact identify a prisoner who had previously been arrested. Camecasse did not want to appear unreasonable; he assigned two clerks to assist Bertillon in taking the measurements and recording them on the new cards. (Apparently, he also looked the other way when Bertillon added an irregular volunteer to his small force: Amélie.)

  Three months was not a long time. To prove the value of his system, Bertillon had to hope that some malefactor would be arrested not only once but twice during that ninety-day span. Amélie urged him not to lose heart; she was confident he would succeed.

  Still, his mood was gloomy late one afternoon in February 1883. Two months had passed, more than a thousand men and women had been measured after having been taken into custody, but as far as Bertillon could determine, no one had appeared on his cards twice. As if to mock him, seven of the men arrested that day had given their name as Dupont — for some reason an alias that was in vogue in Paris at that time. After measuring the seventh man, however, Bertillon’s memory clicked: the prisoner seemed familiar. Of course, he might have seen the man anywhere, but even his measurements rang a bell in Bertillon’s mind. Length of head 187 millimeters, width 156 millimeters.… He went to the card file and began to trace his way through the system, finally reaching a drawer with some fifty cards in it, all with the same approximate measurements as Dupont no. 7. Bertillon began to flip through them until he reached one with exactly the same measurements. On the original card the prisoner had given his name as Martin, but he was undeniably the same as the Dupont now in custody.

  Confronted, Dupont at first denied that he had been arrested before. (The reason that Dupont was now on the street again was that his previous offense was so trivial that he had received no jail time: he had been caught stealing empty bottles.) He hoped to evade jail once again, as first-time offenders often did. Bertillon pointed out that his measurements were identical to those of the man arrested for stealing bottles. Dupont said it was a coincidence, so Bertillon showed him the photograph on the earlier card. There was no denying that similarity, and Dupont/Martin confessed.

  It was the success Bertillon had hoped for. He could hardly wait to tell those few who had believed in him: Amélie and his father, who was now living in the countryside at Neuilly. When Bertillon visited him, he found that his father’s health was rapidly failing. Louis-Adolphe rallied a bit on hearing that his wayward son had at last accomplished something, but a full recovery was beyond him, and Bertillon and his brother, Jacques, were at the old man’s bedside when he died. Before passing, Louis-Adolphe told his sons, “I have always been in search of truth. You, my dear boys, must do the same.” 12

  At the prefecture in Paris, skeptics still argued that the success Bertillon had proclaimed might have been merely a fluke. When Camecasse extended the time of the system’s trial, however, more recidivists began to appear. By the end of 1883, Bertillon was uncovering one every three days, and there was no doubt that bertillonage was here to stay. Amélie, who had written out 7,336 cards during that year, received her reward by becoming Mme. Bertillon; it was a marriage that continued to double as a partnership.

  iii

  Despite the success, many in the police department resented the new system, just as they had earlier bridled at Vidocq’s methods. Whenever possible, they tried to discomfit Bertillon by making him come to the morgue and identify mangled bodies, a task he hated. Though such trips made him almost sick, he did finally gain the respect of his critics. One day a detective who faced the problem of identifying a decaying body with a very large head mentioned it to Bertillon. The circumstances — the corpse had been fished from the Marne — created some suspicion that the dead man had a criminal background, so Bertillon came to measure him. Although the body’s condition made it impossible to take all eleven critical measurements, there were enough to make an identification: Bertillon’s files showed that the man had been accused of assault a year before. That brought the police to question those involved and to discover that the victim had been murdered in revenge for the earlier incident. After that, identification of unknown corpses became a regular duty for Bertillon and his assistants.

  The press, as always, was fascinated by crime stories, and the ensuing publicity helped Bertillon’s program. In November 1887, L’Illustration sent a reporter to Bertillon’s lab. The journalist wrote of men on pedestals, leaning over calibrated iron tables and seated on bolted-down chairs as they used calipers, meter sticks, and cameras. The technology of precise measurements, the reporter made clear, was supplementing and replacing the system of relying solely on policemen’s memories.

  Gradually, Bertillon’s superiors realized how valuable his work was. On February 1, 1888, six years after his first success, he was made chief of the newly established Service of Judicial Identity. He set up shop on the top floor of the Palais de Justice. Perhaps it was to Bertillon’s liking that the office had to be reached via a long and steep staircase, discouraging casual visitors and those who didn’t have something important to report. By this time, his system had become well enough known that other police forces in Europe and America were beginning to adopt it. As it became widespread, some complained that taking the eleven measurements was too difficult for an ordinary underpaid police clerk and that not everyone was able to produce measurements as precise as those Bertillon himself made. The founder of the system brushed aside such objections, saying that “anyone who was not an imbecile could learn to measure in five minutes and never forget the process.” 13 In Paris alone, by the end of the first decade of its use, Bertillon’s measurement system led to the capture and identification of thirty-five hundred criminals. 14

  Bertillon was continually searching for new ways to employ scientific methods in crime solving. At one point, he added to his reputation by making duplicate copies of identity photographs and cutting them into pieces. He divided the pieces into groups according to facial parts — noses, ears, eyes, and so forth — and compiled charts to show illustrations of the various types of each. By doing so, he was trying to find a way to assist policemen in making more precise descriptions of the suspects they brought into custody. Bertillon proved in a series of experiments that detectives who had failed to identify a suspect based on a regular photograph could often identify their target if just one feature was isolated. It was the skill of the detective “to analyze each of these traits separately and, consequently, to compare each isolated trait with the corresponding trait of another face.” 15 Bertillon put special emphasis on the ears of criminals for making an identification, for he believed ears were both difficult to disguise and easy to remember. Eventually, his efforts produced what was called a portrait parlé, or spoken portrait. Lecture courses trained policemen in the technique of observing and memorizing the formation of ears, noses, and other characteristics according to a gradated scale.

  As the historian Matt Matsuda has written, “The nose, for example, was divided into three distinct features, its height, width and projection, each part precisely designated and numbered.… Bertillon maintained that as long as a particular anatomical feature had not received ‘a name permitting the form and descriptive value to be stored in the memory,’ it would remain ‘unperceived,’ as if it ‘did not exist.’ Seeing a face was a fine thing, but such memories were easily tricked. Better to concentrate the identifications of memory in language. As Bertillon put it, ‘it has been said for a
long time: we only think that which we are able to express in words.’” 16

  Similarly, modern artists and scientists, using their own methods, were finding fresh vocabularies, visual and verbal, for new concepts of the world. Artists in particular shared with Bertillon the requirement that viewers must put together the pieces themselves, forming an image from discrete elements. One can see the process in movies, cubism, impressionism, and statistics, the very science that underlies Bertillon’s method. His philosophy, which could easily have been adopted by Picasso, was written in large black letters on the wall of the room where he trained recruits: “The eye sees in each thing only what it is looking for, and it looks for what is already an idea in the mind.” 17

  Just as the basis of anthropometry was the idea of providing precise measurements of the human body, so Bertillon hoped to develop other measuring tools to assist in crime detection. After having honed his photographic skills to produce mug shots, Bertillon started to bring a camera along to crime scenes. Police officers became used to his instructing them to touch nothing until he could make a photographic record, often from several angles, of a body or a burglary. Bertillon pasted his photographs onto cards that showed the precise scale of measurements on the border. Today’s crime scene investigators may use Polaroids or digital cameras to get instant images, but they are following the same procedure Bertillon pioneered more than a century ago.